Inverse of COALESCE

No, the closest you an get is NULLIF(), but that's not what you want. I'd just stick to using the OR statement here.

Since NULLs propogate you could do:

(cola + colb + colc) is null

assuming all compatible data types

Here is a moderately unpleasant way of doing it:

set ansi_nulls off
if (null in (a, b, c, d, e) print 'got a null'
set ansi_nulls on